ggsict.org

“For years, I have been on a personal crusade to put whatever effort I could into helping raise awareness of our industry,” McGowan said. “I have spent hundreds (probably thousands) of hours answering questions about everything from how to connect a loudspeaker to how a transistor works, all in service to PS Audio customers and the high end.”

It’s all in the Audiophile Wiki: audio companies, designers, analog, digital, tubes, transistors, reviewers, speakers, amplifiers, turntables, etc. For example, if you’re just getting into vinyl, check out the entry for Phono Cartridge:

“A phono cartridge is a device that reads the grooves on a phonograph record. There are multiple types of phono cartridges, moving magnet, moving coil, strain gauge, ceramic cartridge, and many others through the years.

The audiophile lexicon goes way, way back, at least to the early 1950s hi-fi craze. Here’s a place to get a grip on it.

All phono cartridges share in common the conversion of mechanical movement into either sound (mechanical cartridge) or electrical energy for later amplification.

The Audiophile Wiki launched in May of this year, so there’s lots of gaps. Feel free to fill in missing facts.

The Audiophile Wiki logo

The Audiophile Wiki was initiated by PS Audio’s Paul McGowan to help answer questions about audio.

But it’s not really the same: Boxee has brought back Hulu by extending its support for RSS feeds, and is pulling the video content in that way.

Industry talks continue, the post continued. “While we don’t come from an entertainment or cable background, we are learning quickly. It is a complex business. Our meetings with Hulu and their content providers reinforced that point,” Ronen wrote. “They are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time.”

Media-center start-up Boxee, which aggregates Web video for television set-top boxes, has launched a new version that restores access to video hub Hulu. The NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture had pulled its content from Boxee after content partners took issue with it.

“Like IE,
Firefox, or Google Reader, the RSS reader supports Google Video, Yahoo, YouTube and feeds from many other websites,” a post on the Boxee blog by CEO Avner Ronen read. “While it’s not as attractive or robust as our previous Hulu application, it will additionally support Hulu’s public RSS feeds.”

If Apple were to open up the iPhone to other carriers it could increase sales of the older model phones, while continuing sales of the new iPhone 3GS with O2.

T-Mobile is so sure that they will get the contract for the iPhone 3G that its call center employees have already begun telling customers that it may have the iPhone in the future, according to Mobile Today

According to a report on Mobile Today, Apple may open up iPhone 3G sales to other wireless carriers in the U.K., namely O2 competitors Orange and T-Mobile. O2’s exclusive with Apple reportedly ends in September, giving Apple a couple of months to set up other deals.

Verizon’s work on its 4G network, which is based on the GSM standard, have kept the rumors alive. AT&T is said to be negotiating with Apple to keep its exclusivity deal.

Like it does in most countries, Apple has a preferred wireless carrier in the United Kingdom. In this case the carrier is O2, but that may not be the case for long, at least for the
iPhone 3G.

(Credit:
Apple)

Many people in the U.S. are hoping Apple will do the same thing here. Rumors of talks between Apple and wireless carrier Verizon have been floating around for months, but so far nothing official has happened.

Some environmental groups, notably Greenpeace, have criticized the House’s climate and energy bill for giving big businesses such as utilities too much leeway in meeting the cap on carbon emissions, which will be phased in on over the next decade.

The United States risks missing the business opportunity posed by moving to low-carbon energy, two prominent business leaders argued in an editorial aimed at policy makers.

At a high level, the position of these companies–and many others–is that developing low-carbon products and services will serve both economic and environmental goals: low-carbon technologies, such as efficient lighting or solar, can revitalize American industry and curb greenhouse gases.

But Doerr and Immelt run through a number of statistics to demonstrate that the U.S. is so far a bit player in the global marketplace for solar, wind, advanced batteries, and fuel efficiency.

In the editorial, Doerr and Immelt said U.S. policies should indicate that the U.S. values “low-carbon energy.”

John Doerr, investor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

They offered five policy prescriptions: put a price on carbon and cap emissions; regulate utilities with incentives for efficiency and renewable energy; strengthen efficiency standards for
cars, buildings, and appliances; establish more federal funding for research, development, and deployment of energy technologies; and create new trade agreements to promote the export of U.S. products.

Still, work continues on energy and climate policy in Washington even though much of the media attention is on the health care debate.

But proposals to encourage deployment of these technologies at scale has met resistance from entrenched interests and some lawmakers. Among the concerns are that climate and clean-energy policies will significantly raise energy prices for consumers and hurt U.S. industry compete globally.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

Both Immelt and Doerr are economic advisers to President Obama and executives from both companies regularly have testified on energy and climate policies for Congressional committees.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, published an editorial in The Washington Post Monday to warn that the U.S. is lagging China is developing clean-energy technologies.

The U.S. continues to produce innovative companies in the Internet but they argue that policies in energy, a highly regulated field, stifle innovation and U.S. competitiveness: “Our government’s energy and climate policies are our principal obstacle to success,” they said.

Crux of the issue

Doerr and Immelt’s piece strikes at the heart of the energy and environment policy debate in the U.S. There are a number of technologies that can displace fossil fuel use right now and new technologies, such as plug-in electric vehicles, hold more promise.

“We are clearly not in the lead today. That position is held by China, which understands the importance of controlling its energy future. China’s commitment to developing clean energy technologies and markets is breathtaking,” they wrote.

A giant conglomerate, GE is deeply involved in the energy industry and is one of the top global suppliers of wind turbines. One of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital companies, Kleiner Perkins has been aggressively pursuing green technology, having invested $680 million in 48 upstarts.

People in green technology business, in general, favor the bill because it establishes a system for pricing carbon emissions and has other policies to invest in energy-related infrastructure, such the electricity grid technologies and battery manufacturing.

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

The House narrowly passed an energy and climate bill that would mandate more renewable energy from utilities and establish a cap-and-trade system for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from large polluters. The Senate is devising its version of the bill and could vote on it in the fall.

As part of the deal announced on Wednesday, Microsoft will now be responsible for trying to merge those efforts. In an interview, Microsoft Senior Vice president Yusuf Mehdi said Microsoft hasn’t looked at the specific lines of code in that area, but is open to trying to take Yahoo’s best ideas and integrate them into Bing.

Both Mehdi and Yahoo Executive VP Schneider acknowledged that there are integration challenges, but Schneider said there is a clear delineation of who is responsible for what.

Ultimately, though, the two companies said they expect just integrating Bing’s results into Yahoo in the U.S. will take several months, while moving from Yahoo’s Panama ad-serving technology to Microsoft’s AdCenter could take a year. It could be two years from the deal close before the two companies can fully implement the deal across the globe.

“We will do all of the pre-work that we are allowed to do in terms of preparing,” Mehdi said. “We feel like we can make a lot of progress.”

Microsoft has spent much of its energy in the last couple years refining its core technology, improving in vertical categories, and rebranding its Web search under the Bing moniker. Yahoo, meanwhile has put a lot of energy into tools that allow others to build on its technology, including the BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey efforts.

“At the same time we are integrating, we are really divide-and-conquering,” Schneider said in the joint interview with Mehdi. “The reality is in the way we structured (the deal), it allows each of us to innovate in the areas that will jointly bring advantage.”

It wasn’t just the typical few business development executives in a room hashing out financial details, the pair said. “We really have got a great vibe with Yahoo’s operating team,” Mehdi said.

Microsoft’s Mehdi didn’t close the door on an eventual expansion of the deal into some of the areas the two companies had at one point considered, such as joint work on display advertising.

In the coming months, Microsoft and Yahoo will not only have to win regulatory approval for the deal, but also figure out how to bring together disparate approaches to the search market.

“Today is a start on a fantastic partnership which we are very excited about,” Mehdi said. “By starting this partnership it allows us to over time build greater and deeper relationships. Right now the focus is on getting to a credible No. 2 player in search and paid search.”

In addition to being run by the top management from Microsoft’s online group, including Mehdi, Senior Vice President Satya Nadella, and online unit President Qi Lu (a former Yahoo executive), Mehdi and Schneider said the negotiating teams routinely called on the companies’ engineering and sales ranks to make sure the deal they were structuring made operational sense.

“We believe this is a winning plan,” she said. “People want to be part of a winning vision.”

Ultimately, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said some of Yahoo search employees will move to other parts of the company, some will be offered jobs at Microsoft, while others will eventually lose their jobs.

Schneider

Mehdi

CEO Steve Ballmer noted on the conference call earlier Wednesday that the two sides have a 100-page playbook as opposed to a two-page term sheet and also noted that the negotiations were handled by management as opposed to representatives of the company’s boards.

The two companies will be able to do some work on their joint plans while the deal is pending, but there are limits as to how much collaboration can take place.

One of the open questions is what will happen to each company’s business and workforce during the time that the deal is pending. Schneider said the companies have a communications plan for employees as well as the sorts of retention bonuses planned to keep key employees in place.

Microsoft’s search deal with Yahoo is the culmination of months of well documented negotiations, but in many ways, it is just the beginning of the long road ahead.

Whereas last year’s negotiations were done with Yahoo’s board and a keen eye on Wall Street, the deal announced on Wednesday is much more focused on how to build a search business for the long term.

The fact that the companies have already spent time thinking about these issues reflects the different nature of the discussions this time around.

“We like the approach that Yahoo has done,” he said, referring to SearchMonkey and BOSS.

For his part, Mehdi said the company will continue to beef up its search staff while the deal is pending. “We are continuing to hire and invest in search.”

Gant will file a brief with the court arguing that this is “an abuse of the class action process,” according to the Times, which also noted that some legal scholars believe this is a novel challenge to the settlement. Many of the objections have focused on the fact that with the settlement, there’s only one institution in the United States that has the legal authority to scan out-of-print books still protected by copyright: Google.

Google’s plan to digitize books on a grand scale has its fair share of detractors, and Scott Gant will soon join them in opposition to the settlement according to The New York Times. Gant, a lawyer with Boies Schiller & Flexner, says he’s acting on his own as an author concerned about the use of class action status to lump all authors into the same pool.

Google told the Times that regardless of how the deal was reached, rights holders still have control over their destiny, and can opt out of the settlement should they wish to prohibit Google from scanning their work. A final hearing in the case is scheduled for October.

Several groups acting on behalf of publishers and authors sued Google in 2005 over its plan to digitize books, and the suit was granted class action status. That meant that when Google and the publishing groups settled the lawsuit in 2008, publishers and authors that held the rights to books that were out of print but still protected by copyright law had to opt out of the settlement if they didn’t want to participate in the project. They have until next month to do so.

The class action status meant that Google did not have to individually negotiate with rights holders for “orphan works,” a vast undertaking that nonetheless should have been conducted if Google and the parties to the settlement were truly interested in preserving the rights of authors, Gant argues. As part of the settlement, Google has had to show that it is taking as many steps as possible to ensure all possible rights holders have been informed about the settlement and their options under the agreement, but Gant’s brief plans to say that licensing agreements should not be established via class action lawsuit.

A new objection to Google’s Book Search settlement with books rights holders plans to argue that the parties to the settlement are “trying to ram this through so that millions of copyright holders will have no idea that this is happening.”

Much of what I write about the cloud drills down on particular aspects or is a reaction to some vendor’s announcement. Here I’m going to take a different approach and take a broader look at where things stand today and some of the challenges ahead.

4. Security and compliance are high on the list of those reasons. I often see such concerns essentially trivialized as a matter of attaining a comfort level or a level of knowledge–sort of an enterprise version of consumer worries about the safety of online banking. However, as I noted after CloudCamp Boston, we’re now getting into very real and very thorny questions such as how right-to-audit clauses can be satisfied in a cloud computing environment.

6. There is no “Big Switch.” Nick Carr’s The Big Switch argued that computing is on a similar trajectory to what we saw with electrical power generation and distribution. If so, that would make cloud computing a fundamentally disruptive economic model rather than a mostly gradual shift toward software being delivered as a service and IT being incrementally outsourced to larger IT organizations. However, so far, there is scant evidence that, once you reach the size of industrialized data center operations (call it a couple of data centers to take care of redundancy), the operational economics associated with an order of magnitude greater scale are compelling. Specialization, such as to meet industry-specific compliance and regulatory requirements, will also tend to mitigate cloud computing concentration.

3. Private clouds exist and will continue to exist. I’m not a huge fan of the term, but many enterprises simultaneously want to take advantage of the technologies and approaches associated with public clouds while continuing to operate their own IT infrastructure (or, at least, to maintain dedicated hardware at a third-party provider). Some of this is doubtless “server hugging” and some is giving IT-as-usual a trendy new name. However, there are lots of reasons why enterprises can’t just move to a multi-tenant public cloud provider and it’s not even clear that it makes economic sense for many to do so.

1. Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Cloud computing is real. Yes, there’s a lot of hype and a lot of “cloud-washing” (applying the cloud term to only peripherally-related things). But cloud computing legitimately refers to a convergence of technologies and trends that are starting to make IT infrastructures and applications more dynamic, more modular, and more network-centric.

7. Data portability is a must. Interoperability less so. Although data portability isn’t a panacea–even if you can extract your information in a documented format that doesn’t mean you can transparently make use of it somewhere else–it’s a base-level requirement. Interoperability is trickier. We’re seeing some standardization activity at the IaaS level through a combination of de facto standards, consortia, and third-party brokers that translate among services. However, as we move further up the software stack, there are significant trade-offs between standardization and useful differentiation.

I started following and writing about topics like Amazon Web Services and mashups even before they were corralled under the “cloud computing” moniker. But today, cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in IT.

8. Cloud computing and virtualization intersect in interesting ways, but they’re not the same thing. The flexibility and mobility provided by server virtualization is a great match for cloud platforms in general. And certain types of cloud computing largely define themselves in terms of the virtual machine containers that virtualization creates. However, companies such as Google have demonstrated that large-scale distributed infrastructures don’t require server virtualization; they architect their infrastructures using other techniques and provide higher-level abstractions and services to users.

10. The cloud will change the client. There often seems to be an implicit assumption that, over time, computing moves into the cloud and mobile devices become interchangeable display and input devices. The reality is more complicated. Copies of our devices’ “state,” whether data or personal customizations, will indeed migrate into the network. However, both user experience and the reality of sometimes-connected networks suggest that there’s a lot of reason to push many computing tasks and working data sets out to the client device. The client will change but it won’t become just a portable version of a “dumb tube.”

5. Closely related are legal matters. I hear a lot of generalized concern that the requirements for law enforcement to obtain data from a service provider may well be, at least in practice, lower than those needed to obtain a warrant for a company’s own servers. Furthermore, we’ve already seen a case where the FBI confiscated servers from a hosting provider above and beyond those related to the specific company under investigation. Borders, especially national ones, also carry–not always well understood–legal implications.

9. Location-based applications will reach their potential through cloud computing. People have been talking about the potential of apps that understand place almost since cell phones went mainstream. However, it’s the intersection of more precise sensors on the client (GPS augmenting cell signal triangulation) and easily-consumable cloud-based applications that can mash up that data with geographical databases and the data from other users of a service that are moving apps about “place” into the mainstream.

2. The industry has reached a rough consensus on a basic taxonomy for public clouds. We have infrastructure as a service (e.g. Amazon Web Services), platform as a service (Microsoft’s Azure), and software as a service (Salesforce.com). People may quibble about some of the details and about how to characterize standalone Web services and such but IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS have developed into a convenient shorthand for describing the basic levels of abstraction for network-based computing.

Google buys video compression outfit On2

At Black Hat and Defcon, hackers talk shop

Also in today’s podcast: Sony releases new e-book readers; Google picks up a video compression start-up; ESPN limits employee tweets; and more of today’s top headlines.

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

eSolar: Where software meets solar power

Hanging with hackers can make you paranoid

Listen now:

With new Readers, Sony drops price of e-books

Some tweets now of out bounds at ESPN

Yahoo has escape clause in Microsoft search deal

The Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences wrapped up over the weekend, and security reporter Elinor Mills was in Las Vegas for both. But over the years, she’s learned that it’s wise to pack a bit of paranoia when you go to such shows. She joins today’s podcast to talk about the kinds of hijinks that took place at this year’s event.

And as is often the case with ARGs, this game, too, is in the service of promoting something else, in this case, Ratliff’s larger article.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for information as to why the account was suspended.

Still, I really want to know what “strange activity” caused the service to take down the account. I’ll update this article if I find out.

(Credit:
Twitter)

But as of Friday morning, his Twitter account (@theatavist) had been suspended for “strange activity.”

This game, then, has many of the makings of a traditional alternate-reality game: online and offline components, widespread community involvement, clues spread across a wide swath of the Internet and a prize that may, in the end, have to be shared by a number of people who worked together.

Wired readers who want to try to win the $5,000 prize for finding reporter Evan Ratliff may not be able to use clues posted to his Twitter account, as the account has been suspended for ’strange activity.’

For now, those trying to find him and win the cash–and no doubt, bragging rights, as Ratliff said that to collect the prize, the winner has to agree to be interviewed on his or her methods–will have to do so without the assistance of his Twitter account. Then again, Twitter has been going through a rough time recently, with several periods of downtime.

Update (2:27 p.m.): The account is now back up. According to a Twitter spokesperson, it was “infected” for some reason.

Of course, given that Ratliff is surely employing everything he can think of to stay below radar (theoretically not using credit cards or doing anything that might too easily give away his whereabouts) the Twitter account suspension might somehow be intentional. Then again, one would have to wonder what he would have had to do to get Twitter on board.

In the meantime, there are plenty of other ways to find clues. One is another Twitter account that was set up as a clearinghouse for information (@EvansVanished). Another is a Facebook account called The Search for Evan Ratliff, where fans are posting clues and working collaboratively to solve the puzzle.

Whoever finds Ratliff (and is the first to send his editor a photo of him) will win $5,000. And while there are a number of different ways to source up clues as to his whereabouts, one of them was supposed to be his Twitter account.

The challenge is an interesting way to draw attention to a recent article of Ratliff’s about the difficulties of disappearing from society. And in the original contest challenge, it was suggested that contest participants might draw some conclusions as to the methods the reporter would use–or wouldn’t, as the case may be–from that story.

When Wired recently launched its Vanish contest, a challenge to readers to locate reporter Evan Ratliff, who has gone on the “lam,” it suggested that a major source of clues would be Ratliff’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

By the way, that this is exactly why EMC purchased Fastscale last month, as noted by Chuck Hollis, EMC’s CTO of global marketing, on the day the acquisition was announced. Simon Crosby, CTO of the data center and cloud division at Citrix, also notes that this change is coming but sees the OS playing a more important transitional role.

However, any given application doesn’t need all those bells and whistles, and most OSes are unfortunately not designed to adjust their footprint to the needs of a specific application.

My own observation here is that our current spate of operating systems were designed when competitors were pushing to use the OS as a differentiator–a way of distinguishing one company’s product experience from another. OSes started out being targeted at software, providing a way for applications to use a generalized API to acquire and consume the resources they needed.

Next on the list is an explanation of why cloud computing drives infrastructure toward homogeneity (at least within a data center) and why that is the bane of server virtualization.

Virtual machines (VMs) represent the symptoms of a set of legacy problems packaged up to provide a placebo effect as an answer that in some cases we have, until lately, appeared disinclined and not technologically empowered to solve.

He summarizes his thoughts nicely at the opening of the post:

Because of this, I’ll be following up with a few posts this week that will expand on this concept and give you much more of a sense of why the operating system, along with most server, network, and storage virtualization is a stop-gap measure as we move to a cloud experience centered on the application user and the developer.

His post last week reflects a realization attained by those who consider the big picture of cloud computing long enough.

So, the problem isn’t that OS capabilities are not needed, just that they are ridiculously packaged, and could in fact be wrapped into software frameworks that hide any division between the application and the systems it runs on.

Furthermore, the operating system increasingly targeted not the needs of software, but the needs of people; more specifically, the needs of computing buyers. Take a look at OS X, or Windows, or even “enterprise” Linux distributions today. The number of features and packages that are included to entice software developers, system administrators, or even consumers to consume the product is overwhelming.

This is a critical concept for application developers wondering how cloud computing will affect software architectures. It is also a critical concept for why IT operations professionals need to understand that their roles and responsibilities are changing.

At the time, computers had one CPU and the logical thing to do was to design a single OS that could run multiple applications, preferably at once. This created the need for additional functionality to both manage resources and manage the applications themselves.

The approach we’ve taken today is that the VMM/Hypervisor abstracts the hardware from the OS. The applications are still stuck on top of operating systems that don’t provide much in the way of any benefit given the emergence of development frameworks/languages such as J2EE, PHP, Ruby, .NET, etc. that were built around the notions of decoupled, distributed and mashable application “fabrics.”

If I had a wish, it would be that VM’s end up being the short-term gap-filler they deserve to be and ultimately become a legacy technology so we can solve some of our real architectural issues the way they ought to be solved.

Chris Hoff, my friend and colleague at Cisco Systems, has reached enlightenment regarding the role of the operating system and, subsequently, the need for the virtual machine in a cloud-centric world.

Hoff goes on to note that the real problem isn’t the VM, but the modern operating system: